And how will countries fare in the Fourth Globalization? Ever since the days of David Ricardo, two centuries ago, economists have taught that countries should specialize in those activities they perform most efficiently and import the rest. But “comparative advantage,” already suspect because of the role of subsidies in influencing the pattern of trade in goods, is all but meaningless in the digital age, as it becomes steadily more challenging to figure out how much of a product’s value was added in one place and how much in another. The balance of trade, then, has become a useless measure for tracking winners and losers, an idea whose time has come and gone. A country’s success in the Fourth Globalization will depend not on whether the statisticians compute a surplus or a deficit, but on whether its citizens’ living standards rise as they navigate a fast-changing world economy—and whether it ensures that the benefits of a globalized world are shared widely among its citizens.
The interruption of international commerce owing to COVID-19 is unlikely to change these trends. When the virus fouled international trade in first part of 2020, it was heralded as laying bare the vulnerabilities of global value chains. That its effects were large is indisputable: by one estimate, fifty-one thousand companies around the world had a direct supplier in the affected provinces of China, where the pandemic began, and at least five million companies purchased from suppliers that themselves relied on suppliers in the region.
Şeyh Adi'nin kendisinin de bir Mecusi olduğuna dair Yezi- dilerin arasında kesin bir inanç vardı. Wilgram'lar The Cradie of Mankind isimli kitaplarında; 'Onun (Şeyh Adi) 10. yüzyılda (tartışmalı bir tarih) yaşamış olduğuna ve aslında Mecusi kül- tü baskı altına alındığı zaman Halep'ten kaçmış bir Mecusi ol- duğuna dair tarihi kanıtlar var görünmektedir' demişlerdir.ıo Yezidi inancını ve kutsal kitaplarını ortaya koyan kişiydi ve onun ruhu dünyanınson günlerinde tekrar gelecek; böyl/ce Meleke Tawus'un Medi veya Mehdi olarak bir daha dünyaya geleceği kehaneti de gerçekleşecekti.
There are several reasons “stuff” is losing ground. One is that the world is aging. The median age of the global population, 23.3 years in 1985, was 31 years and climbing in 2019. While there were plenty of young consumers in Africa and South Asia, there were not so many in wealthier economies; by 2018, half the people in Japan and Germany were over age 47, and in Russia, China, and the United States the median age approached 40. Older households have had years to accumulate home furnishings and wardrobes full of clothing, and they are often disinclined to acquire more; vacation trips, restaurant meals, and medical bills are likely to figure larger in their spending than furniture and fixtures. Restaurants and hospitals also buy tables and chairs, of course, but their needs will not make up for fewer purchases by households. The share of the global population under age 15, 38 percent in the late 1960s, shrank to a mere 25 percent half a century later. With fewer young households to replace aging ones, housing, and the furnishings that go with it, is in less demand. By the European Central Bank’s count, the European Union had fewer dwellings in 2018 than two years earlier.
In other ways, though, globalization was a more powerful force than ever: KFC, formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken, was far and away the largest restaurant chain in China; the leading football teams in England’s Premier League, few of them either starring or owned by Englishmen, were widely watched across Africa; and Russian sunseekers visiting the Mall of Dubai could browse housewares at Galeries Lafayette, jewelry at Van Cleef & Arpels, and fragrances at Chanel, topped off with a macaroon from Ladurée, all without the bother of flying to Paris. Worldwide, 1.5 billion tourist arrivals were recorded in 2019, four times as many as in 1987, and, according to the company’s figures, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population checked Facebook on the average day.
ONE TREND above all drove the Third Globalization: a rapidly improving material standard of living. In 1987, China’s streets were crowded with bicycles, and its auto plants turned out all of 17,840 new cars; thirty years later, Beijing was famous for bumper-to-bumper traffic, and China produced more motor vehicles by far than any other country. The price of girls’ clothing, by the estimates of US government number crunchers, was far lower in the 2010s than it had been in the 1980s; perhaps that explains why the average person in Great Britain purchased five times as many pieces of apparel in 2017 as three decades earlier. The median new home built in the United States in 2017 was 38 percent larger than in 1987, with 2,426 square feet of space to furnish with lounge chairs, rugs, and free weights; there was a one-in-three chance that it had more than one refrigerator. Without much exaggeration, the years of the Third Globalization could aptly be named the age of stuff.